We can do better than that
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@Fox said in We can do better than that:
I'm not the one saying that whatever Zuckerberg does is guaranteed to be riddled with corruption.
Dude, fuck off with this bullshit...neither did I.
It's not a flamewar thread.
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
@Fox said in We can do better than that:
I'm not the one saying that whatever Zuckerberg does is guaranteed to be riddled with corruption.
Dude, fuck off with this bullshit...neither did I.
It's not a flamewar thread.
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
The wrong things definitely come into play sometimes, though.
Yes, as it surely will with whatever Zuckerberg stands up.
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@Fox That's not flamewarring; that's just simple common sense.
Google: Don't be evil.
Facebook: Don't even bother pretending we're not evil.
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@Fox said in We can do better than that:
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
@Fox said in We can do better than that:
I'm not the one saying that whatever Zuckerberg does is guaranteed to be riddled with corruption.
Dude, fuck off with this bullshit...neither did I.
It's not a flamewar thread.
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
The wrong things definitely come into play sometimes, though.
Yes, as it surely will with whatever Zuckerberg stands up.
Yes, thank you for proving my point. What the hell, dude? Now stuff that happens "sometimes" is "guaranteed to be riddled with corruption?" Take a break.
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@masonwheeler said in We can do better than that:
@Fox That's not flamewarring; that's just simple common sense.
Google: Don't be evil.
Facebook: Don't even bother pretending we're not evil.
It's not even that. It's just acknowledging that people are people. And shit happens.
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@boomzilla "sometimes" is a weird word. I wonder if you read it as "all people sometimes have the wrong motivations" and fox read it as "some people always have the wrong motivations"?
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@Yamikuronue Yes, I read it the way you guessed that I read it.
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@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
@boomzilla "sometimes" is a weird word. I wonder if you read it as "all people sometimes have the wrong motivations" and fox read it as "some people always have the wrong motivations"?
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
Did you read the article about Silicon valley? What if he just gets enamored of some technology and goes overboard with that because he thinks it's cool?
Well, if that happens, it's his money after all, and it probably isn't hurting anything, so...
Anyway, that's partly why I think it's significant that his wife's the co-founder; he brings the business experience and the fascination with cool tech, and she brings the hands-on experience from the medical field. If what they're doing, for all its cool technological gadgetry, is just plain not useful to doctors, it'd be her responsibility to put the brakes on it and try to shift gears.
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
Well, if that happens, it's his money after all, and it probably isn't hurting anything, so...
Totes.
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
but they can eat a bag of dicks if they start getting all holier than thou about it with respect to the people already doing that stuff.
Exactly my feeling about most new, "alternative" political parties who promise to do everything better than existing parties. It's always fun to watch them fail when they actually get elected and reality hits them hard.
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
Totes.
Totes
A shorter more convenient form of the word: totally. This word is most commonly used by teenage girls.
The most obvious advantage of using this word is the time saved. Data collected at a prestigious university found that every syllable spoken takes approximately 0.14 seconds.
urbandictionary tells
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
hundreds of aging proprietary systems, many of which are maintained by unhelpful and incompetent contractors.
Also financed and overseen by the US government.
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
Such problems aren't unique to government.
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@boomzilla A lot of wrong people are in charge.
Take the price-gouging on that drug that @Fox is so worked up, for example.
"Well, it's not a problem, because of the free market: some other company can make it cheaper and sell it for a reasonable price".
Except, that's really just a slightly different way of saying, "but we care more... if only the right people were in charge".
Except it's not exactly a free market. Otherwise some other company WOULD make it cheaper.
Some other company, that doesn't spend money on research, wouldn't have raised the price.
The big problem is that pharma wants to pay off research with current meds, instead of starting out the new med at a higher price.
Of course, people would say, "but the new med works better, so we need that one to be cheaper". But it's harder to justify, because you can't have your cake and eat it too.
However, it's fairly easy to justify an argument against raising the price of a current working med that many people are dependent on.
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
It's not a flamewar thread.
I'm sure that if we all pull our weight, anything is possible.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
So it's Zuckerberg's fault for not building a bunch of huge piles of old shit that he has to integrate with every new pile of shit that he built, so that we could more accurately compare him to the government?
Like really, when I'm saying "look at this shit the government built", you're going to try to counter that with "but they had to integrate it with all this other shit that they're also responsible for". Awesome, you're not really helping your case and you're sort of making my point.
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@cabrito said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
It wouldn't surprise me terribly if Zuckerberg's piddly little $3e8 per year accomplishes more actual progress than the US federal government's $4.8e9. Consider: Zuckerberg financed and oversaw the building of a successful massive-scale website. The US federal government financed and oversaw the building of healthcare.gov.
TIL that making a greenfield social networking website is a good comparison with creating a system that integrates hundreds of aging proprietary systems, many of which are maintained by unhelpful and incompetent contractors.
exactly
Anyway, seems that you are thinking more about healthcare infrastructure and not research.
Given that he brought up healthcare.gov, what else would you expect?
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
So it's Zuckerberg's fault for not building a bunch of huge piles of old shit that he has to integrate with every new pile of shit that he built, so that we could more accurately compare him to the government?
Every so often, an organization is no longer fit.
But like I've said before, organizations are beasts and they fight for survival.
We keep trying to find ways to take a failed organization into a successful one through refactoring over time, but sometimes the answer is to dump it all and start over.
Just like any other beast, the government, is rarely willing to do that.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
$3 billion... over the next 10 years. So only $300 million a year. The US federal government spends about $4.8 billion per year on cancer alone (source). That's an insulting drop in the bathtub of disease research.
It wouldn't surprise me terribly if Zuckerberg's piddly little $3e8 per year accomplishes more actual progress than the US federal government's $4.8e9. Consider: Zuckerberg financed and oversaw the building of a successful massive-scale website. The US federal government financed and oversaw the building of healthcare.gov.
TIL that making a greenfield social networking website is a good comparison with creating a system that integrates hundreds of aging proprietary systems, many of which are maintained by unhelpful and incompetent contractors.
I have to interject and point out that many of the healthcare.gov failures were in house.
Losing people's healthcare.gov signup data, and constant downtime, are not the faults of the 3rd party systems they were connected to.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
I think that task would be much better done by someone like Zuckerberg. Assuming it was something he wanted to do. How could it be worse than a government project with no accountability or oversite?
Not that there absolutely wouldn't be some Oregon / Oracle like disasters. But worse?
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
I wasn't aware that every system facebook communicates with was built in house.
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@asdf said in We can do better than that:
@masonwheeler said in We can do better than that:
Oh, I definitely suspected he was trolling after the second post. I just wanted to use that acronym again, since I haven't seen it in a long time. ;)
YKYBSTMTOTDWTFW You still remember WTTDWTF memes.
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
So it's Zuckerberg's fault for not building a bunch of huge piles of old shit that he has to integrate with every new pile of shit that he built, so that we could more accurately compare him to the government?
Who said anything about fault? It's much easier to build a greenfield application than it is to make major changes to a legacy application.
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@xaade said in We can do better than that:
I wasn't aware that every system facebook communicates with was built in house.
I'm pretty sure most integrations go the other way: legacy systems being hastily retrofitted to use facebook's apis.
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@cabrito said in We can do better than that:
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
Totes.
Totes
A shorter more convenient form of the word: totally. This word is most commonly used by teenage girls.
The most obvious advantage of using this word is the time saved. Data collected at a prestigious university found that every syllable spoken takes approximately 0.14 seconds.
urbandictionary tells... totes
(PausePausePause) I just wasted that time you saved using that stupidly obnoxious word. And waste more I will.
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@xaade said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
$3 billion... over the next 10 years. So only $300 million a year. The US federal government spends about $4.8 billion per year on cancer alone (source). That's an insulting drop in the bathtub of disease research.
It wouldn't surprise me terribly if Zuckerberg's piddly little $3e8 per year accomplishes more actual progress than the US federal government's $4.8e9. Consider: Zuckerberg financed and oversaw the building of a successful massive-scale website. The US federal government financed and oversaw the building of healthcare.gov.
TIL that making a greenfield social networking website is a good comparison with creating a system that integrates hundreds of aging proprietary systems, many of which are maintained by unhelpful and incompetent contractors.
I have to interject and point out that many of the healthcare.gov failures were in house.
Losing people's healthcare.gov signup data, and constant downtime, are not the faults of the 3rd party systems they were connected to.
The company awarded the contract for the site was grossly incompetent. But it wouldn't have been an easy project even if you had an A-team working on it.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
make major changes to a legacy application
Is that even what happened? Maybe bolt on a couple of new interfaces, but the legacy applications already had some way of getting that data in and out. Was it easy? Probably not. But impossible? Certainly not.
And, as @xaade said, a whole lot of the blame goes directly on healthcare.gov itself. You can't blame all of its problems on the difficulty of integrating it with the legacy systems. I mean, you can, but you'd be wrong.
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@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
@xaade said in We can do better than that:
I wasn't aware that every system facebook communicates with was built in house.
I'm pretty sure most integrations go the other way: legacy systems being hastily retrofitted to use facebook's apis.
Or that there's a much stronger incentive to cooperate.
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@Groaner stronger incentive than the government throwing money at you and telling you to make it work?
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
Now stuff that happens "sometimes" is "guaranteed to be riddled with corruption?" Take a break.
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
surely
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
make major changes to a legacy application
but the legacy applications already had some way of getting that data in and out.
Did they?
Was it easy? Probably not. But impossible? Certainly not.
It's certainly a hell of a lot trickier than building a brand new system with minimal constraints.
And, as @xaade said, a whole lot of the blame goes directly on healthcare.gov itself. You can't blame all of its problems on the difficulty of integrating it with the legacy systems. I mean, you can, but you'd be wrong.
No need to. The discussion is about which project is easier, not pointing fingers.
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@Fox said in We can do better than that:
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
Now stuff that happens "sometimes" is "guaranteed to be riddled with corruption?" Take a break.
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
surely
Are you afraid that not everyone here has decided you are clueless so you're going to rub their noses in it? Why do you keep doing this? It's still not a flamewar thread.
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
@Fox said in We can do better than that:
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
Now stuff that happens "sometimes" is "guaranteed to be riddled with corruption?" Take a break.
@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
surely
Are you afraid that not everyone here has decided you are clueless so you're going to rub their noses in it? Why do you keep doing this? It's still not a flamewar thread.
No. Are you afraid that people are going to realize you're a hypocrite and a moron if I keep pointing out that you just claimed that "surely" === "sometimes" and that "sometimes people prioritize profitability over efficacy in medical research" ~= "we should stop making video games because we could be curing cancer instead"?
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@asdf said in We can do better than that:
@masonwheeler said in We can do better than that:
Oh, I definitely suspected he was trolling after the second post. I just wanted to use that acronym again, since I haven't seen it in a long time. ;)
I currently have the problem that I'm not sure exactly what it means and all searches lead me back to this site.
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner stronger incentive than the government throwing money at you and telling you to make it work?
I used to work for a company that sold a backend database solution and integrated with website companies which provided the front end.
Given all the gnashing of teeth that it took to get everything working between all parties even when our common customers were throwing money at us and telling us to make it work, let's just say that I'm not at all surprised at the result when scaled up.
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@Rhywden said in We can do better than that:
I currently have the problem that I'm not sure exactly what it means and all searches lead me back to this site.
That Doesn't Even Make Sense You Retard.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
@xaade said in We can do better than that:
I wasn't aware that every system facebook communicates with was built in house.
I'm pretty sure most integrations go the other way: legacy systems being hastily retrofitted to use facebook's apis.
Or that there's a much stronger incentive to cooperate.
Insurance companies / Medical Providers may have been tangled up trying to figure out what these laws even effectively mean, to spend lots of time integrating.
Plus, they expected businesses that might not even have had digital systems, to make / buy new ones. It forced my doctor into early retirement.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
@xaade said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
$3 billion... over the next 10 years. So only $300 million a year. The US federal government spends about $4.8 billion per year on cancer alone (source). That's an insulting drop in the bathtub of disease research.
It wouldn't surprise me terribly if Zuckerberg's piddly little $3e8 per year accomplishes more actual progress than the US federal government's $4.8e9. Consider: Zuckerberg financed and oversaw the building of a successful massive-scale website. The US federal government financed and oversaw the building of healthcare.gov.
TIL that making a greenfield social networking website is a good comparison with creating a system that integrates hundreds of aging proprietary systems, many of which are maintained by unhelpful and incompetent contractors.
I have to interject and point out that many of the healthcare.gov failures were in house.
Losing people's healthcare.gov signup data, and constant downtime, are not the faults of the 3rd party systems they were connected to.
The company awarded the contract for the site was grossly incompetent. But it wouldn't have been an easy project even if you had an A-team working on it.
That's a good reason for why Zuckerberg may be more successful.
He IS a tech company, the government is not.
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@boomzilla said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
And just how well would integration of all those legacy systems maintained by all those difficult parties work under Zuckerberg's leadership?
I think that task would be much better done by someone like Zuckerberg. Assuming it was something he wanted to do. How could it be worse than a government project with no accountability or oversite?
Not that there absolutely wouldn't be some Oregon / Oracle like disasters. But worse?
It certainly would be an interesting experiment; however, health information systems aren't very sexy, so it's unlikely that any overly ambitious twentysomethings will be lining up to make proposals.
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@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
health information systems aren't very sexy
Rule 34 implies that someone disagrees. Or that health information systems do not exist.
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@Fox said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
health information systems aren't very sexy
Rule 34 implies that someone disagrees. Or that health information systems do not exist.
"Oh, Healthcare.gov," moaned the third-party system. "Spread wide so that I can plant my XML and CSV seeds inside you. Note that the PII inside them is minimized in accordance with HIPAA."
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@Fox said in We can do better than that:
No. Are you afraid that people are going to realize you're a hypocrite and a moron if I keep pointing out that you just claimed that "surely" === "sometimes" and that "sometimes people prioritize profitability over efficacy in medical research" ~= "we should stop making video games because we could be curing cancer instead"?
By all means, continue to beclown yourself.
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@Yamikuronue Zuckerberg doesn't know shit about shit. He's just a guy who got lucky.
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@Yamikuronue said in We can do better than that:
fox read it as "some people always have the wrong motivations"?
That's a safe bet.
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
@Groaner said in We can do better than that:
hundreds of aging proprietary systems, many of which are maintained by unhelpful and incompetent contractors.
Also financed and overseen by the US government.
Point of order: many of them weren't originally. The Fed Gov't has, throughout the history of the many healthcare-related programs, had to assume management of many, many state, municipal, and private healthcare systems, and conversely, many which were at times in the federal bailiwick have been privatized or moved back to the states. For some of them, this cycle has happened three or more times.
Furthermore, healthcare.gov itself is mainly a clearinghouse for connecting citizens to privately managed insurance companies, PPOs, and HMOs, with varying degrees of subsidizing for different patients. Most of the site's work (and most of that of the whole department it is part of) is talking to those wildly disparate systems, and while they all are required by regulatory law to implement certain protocols, there is more than enough wiggle room in the standards for significant impedance mismatch, not all the systems had working implementations when HC.G came on line, and not all of the required interfaces have a standard protocol.
Finally, while the federal government has the final say, they are reliant on IT contractors to write, maintain, and administer several parts of the system. Between Obama and the series of Congresses that the system passed through the hands of not agreeing on a number of critical points, the combination of some public management and some privatized management (with the split being more or less arbitrary and irregular) has made administering it a vast Gordian knot.
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@anotherusername said in We can do better than that:
As a pediatrician, I'd assume she probably knows a little about health care research.
I'd assume she knows a lot about sticking needles, thermometers, and such in kids. I wouldn't assume she knows anything much about research. Maybe, but not necessarily.
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healthcare.gov
I like how when you click another language you just get taken to a paragraph with a phone number.
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@Yamikuronue cited from somewhere…
Suppose there was a neural-network database engine
Ah, that's a point. They might be going to try to take their own research into AI (and no, I don't know how far they've got, but they've boasted about it in the past so maybe they've something?), feed in the firehose that is the current medical research firehose as training data, and see what they get out the end. It'll probably be less embarrassing than feeding in all of Twitter.
The biggest problem with that is likely that we don't have many very thorough medical researchers. Most are really quite bad at it, and worse don't know nearly enough statistics to be able to even realise that there's a problem even though some people have been making a lot of noise. It's possible to average a bunch of these small studies together — that's what a meta-study is — but that's fraught with problems because all too often even basic info is missing. By basic, I mean stuff like “how many patients did you study?” basic. Not to put too fine a point on it, lots of medical research is shit and it's shit in ways that even a lay-person can figure out with just a little prompting and basic check-list. (I've seen research proving this last point. Sobering stuff.)
Still, if they can figure out how to deal with the vast quantity of crappy research and get something out, maybe they'll be able to make progress. A lot of people have been trying to do that sort of text mining for years, so it's not like it is an area without precedent, and since it isn't including the “go out and look at masses of patients” part, it'll be relatively easily done at fairly low cost. It won't cure all diseases though; human biochemistry and biophysics are fantastically complicated even without diseases in the picture, to the point where even knowing what's going wrong won't always help.
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@dkf said in We can do better than that:
lots of medical research is shit and it's shit in ways that even a lay-person can figure out
Too true. I was just reading this today: https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/21/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-pace-trial/